1. Delawares. As elsewhere stated the Delawares are, in the duration of their separate existence, one of the oldest of the Algonkin tribes. Their home country, when discovered, was the region around and north of Delaware Bay. They are comprised in three gentes, as follows:
I. Wolf. Took´-seat. Round Paw. II. Turtle. Poke-koo-un´-go. Crawling. III. Turkey. Pul-la´-ook. Non-chewing.
These subdivisions are in the nature of phratries, because each is composed of twelve sub-gentes, each having some of the attributes of a gens.[178] The names are personal, and mostly, if not in every case, those of females. As this feature was unusual I worked it out as minutely as possible at the Delaware reservation in Kansas, in 1860, with the aid of William Adams, an educated Delaware. It proved impossible to find the origin of these subdivisions, but they seemed to be the several eponymous ancestors from whom the members of the gentes respectively derived their descent. It shows also the natural growth of the phratries from the gentes.
Descent among the Delawares is in the female line, which renders probable its ancient universality in this form in the Algonkin tribes. The office of sachem was hereditary in the gens, but elective among its members, who had the power both to elect and depose. Property also was hereditary in the gens. Originally the members of the three original gentes could not intermarry in their own gens; but in recent years the prohibition has been confined to the sub-gentes. Those of the same name in the Wolf gens, now partially become a phratry, for example, cannot intermarry, but those of different names marry. The practice of naming children into the gens of their father also prevails among the Delawares, and has introduced the same confusion of descents found among the Shawnees and Miamis. American civilization and intercourse necessarily administered a shock to Indian institutions under which the ethnic life of the people is gradually breaking down.
Examples of succession in office afford the most satisfactory illustrations of the aboriginal law of descent. A Delaware woman, after stating to the author that she, with her children, belonged to the Wolf gens, and her husband to the Turtle, remarked that when Captain Ketchum (Tä-whe´-lä-na), late head chief or sachem of the Turtle gens, died, he was succeeded by his nephew, John Conner (Tä-tä-ne´-sha), a son of one of the sisters of the deceased sachem, who was also of the Turtle gens. The decedent left a son, but he was of another gens and consequently incapable of succeeding. With the Delawares, as with the Iroquois, the office passed from brother to brother, or from uncle to nephew, because descent was in the female line.